Nintendo's Wii Remote came close, but never has a video game peripheral garnered such adoration from the hacker community than the Kinect.

Since the release of Microsoft's controller-free gaming device last November, there has literally been thousands of fun and useful projects that took use of its RGB camera and depth sensitivity functions. And thanks to publicly available open source drivers, we've seen applications in robotics, x-ray vision and even full-body World of WarCraft gaming.

The Kinect is an inspiration and powerful tool to all developers, artists and researchers. This montage from jcl5m highlights some of the best uses of the Kinect's RGB camera and depth sensor from its first five months on the market. Also, check out our recent retrospective of the hacked Kinect for the history behind it all!

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You can see the individual projects from the video below (in order of appearance).

5 Comments

The ones where they used kinect as the desktop interface were also incredible, similar to the touchscreen UI.

I tried installing Kinect on my PC and it wasn't easy. Most guides out there have too many assumptions (like already having or knowing how to use a compiler), and their steps by steps only go so far. It would be nice to have a guide where they treated you as if you had a new system, then walk you through the files you need to download/install/compile.

It might be better to wait for the beta SDK to come out and then do a guide on that. Currently what is out there to make it work is what people have done independently, but MS is coming out with the official software (the SDK) this spring ( http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_kinect_sdk_future_of_windows.php ). It will let you create thing with it as long as it's for non commercial use.

Once this comes out we'll probably see another small explosion of Kinect PC apps from enthusiasts, but this time more people will be able to join in the fun.